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Do you have any ideas for an arts integration project that you’ve always wanted to do in your classroom? Maybe there’s a little nugget or seed of a thought about bringing in your favorite artist to work with your students and colleagues in the back of your mind? The PIA Awards Letter of Intent(LOI) is a great opportunity to get that seed in the ground, and with 4-5″ of rain being dumped on us by Sandy over the next 24 hours or so, germination chances are high. The LOI deadline is December 7, 2012 and the New & Improved online application form makes it easier than ever to submit your proposal. PIA Awards range from $1500-$10,000 and support professional development, visiting artists, supplies and field trips. You can also schedule a FREE workshop for your school or interested team of teachers, and Liz or I will come out and help you turn that seed into a big ol’ tree of a transformative cross-curricular integrated project. So before you lose power and have to go back to school, check out the link above, get that seed in the ground and watch that tree grow.

As a parent, I have never been a fan of hiding vegetables in other food to get my kids to eat healthy stuff. Yes it takes lots of work, patience and modeling, but the development of these beneficial lifelong habits is imperative and my job as a parent. The same is true of using the arts to teach core content. Dance, drawing, tableau, music, sculpture, etc., should not be pureed, diluted and sneaked into the curriculum in miniscule portions.

So here’s to the teachers that spent the first week of their summer vacation developing innovative, creative, and not-pureed curricula involving math, science, history and of course, the arts.

Congrats to the Joan Oates Institute class of 2012!
On the last day everyone struck an action pose for the group photo. Look for the movie, “59 Ninjas or Crouching Teacher, Hidden Art Forms,” soon to be posted to a online video site near you.

Wondering what to do with the integrated curriculum you have developed at the institute or on your own? Apply for a PIA Award to implement your ideas and bring in teaching artists to work with students and teachers in collaborative and transformational ways.

Fantastic. That’s the first word that comes to mind after visiting the fourth grade art class at Laurel Meadow Elementary School this morning. Art teacher Jamesha Hairston has created a wonderful PIA Award project for this year called Laurel Meadow Lion’s Den: An Interactive Reading Environment. For the first part of the project, third, fourth, and fifth graders are making books – beautiful artists’ books – and then creating content for their books, developing their non-fiction writing skills on subjects related to the science and social studies curriculum. A team of Laurel Meadow educators is collaborating on the project with Ms. Hairston, among them the librarian, the instructional technology resource teacher, the reading specialist, and classroom teachers. The books that the students make will be placed in the school library.

This morning the fourth graders were working with artist Ginna Cullen as they began to assemble their books. Ms. Cullen showed them a number of books she had made so they could see what was possible. The children were in awe: you can do that with paper and cardboard? Ms. Cullen’s hand-made books are incredibly beautiful, some simple and some complex, with detailed hand-sewn spines.

In the spring, the 4th and 5th grade students will work with muralist Janet Gilmore-Bryan on a mural for the reading area in the school library, the Lion’s Den. (Can you guess what the school’s mascot is?) The students will learn how murals impact the environment and how they can celebrate community. Then they’ll brainstorm as a group to create a design for their mural.

We had a special event at this year’s Joan Oates Institute, held June 25-29 at the Modlin Center: a celebration of the teachers who have won 2012-13 PIA Awards for their schools as well as those who carried out award projects in 2011-12.

PIA Awards fund cross-curricular, thematic projects that use the arts to change the way core subjects such as history, math, and science are taught. We believe that teachers and other educators who are close to the classroom are the best people to develop these projects. They know what will work and what will ignite student interest. They also know which of their colleagues would be perfect to be part of the team that carries out the project along with visiting artists. Awards can be up to $10,000 each to schools that are in the PIA consortium and are designed to make lasting changes in how the curriculum is taught. They also help build students’ 21st century skills, including innovation, collaboration, and critical thinking.

The PIA Awards celebration was held on Thursday, June 28, in Camp Concert Hall, a beautiful theater in UR’s Booker Hall that was also the site of several other JOI 12 events. Rob and I wanted to do it in style so we ordered custom-designed trophies for both sets of award recipients. Who knew you could mix and match trophy elements to get just what you’re looking for? Makes you want to order trophies for your next dinner party. We were delighted to see that the options included a leaping bass, which looked pretty close to Joan Oates’s signature salmon pin, representative of her fishing exploits.

Joan handed out the trophies but had a special guest to help her do this: Holly Rice, who co-founded Partners in the Arts in the early 1990s and gave her all to make sure it was a well-established and successful program. Holly lives in Los Angeles now but was able to be part of the event to talk about her experience with PIA and the value of the arts in PreK-12 education. Joan and Holly were given trophies as well. Joan’s said “Founder Award.” Holly’s said “Superstar Award.” Below you can see Joan, left, and Holly on stage with their trophies.

Here’s a list of the seven 2012-13 PIA Award recipients with a brief description of the award projects they will carry out in the new school year. More information about each project can be found in this feature story.

Armstrong High School, Richmond, $7,500, for Not too far From Here: A Plein Air History of Richmond. Students will investigate the history of their neighborhoods and communities through guided tours, journaling, video and audio recording, and “open air” drawing and painting.

Pocahontas Elementary School, Powhatan, $7,600 for Come Tell Your Story: A Powhatan Perspective –Local History through Storytelling. Students will document family and community members’ life stories, in writing and video, as a way to increase understanding of cultural differences in Powhatan County.

Miles Jerome Jones Elementary School, Richmond, $3,000 for a project called Dance by Design, for Pre-K and Kindergarten students. The project uses creative movement related to monthly themes in the core curriculum to teach young children literacy and number skills

Clover Hill High School, Chesterfield, $6,100 for The “Paths” Project, which combines English, history and visual arts to record the experiences of the community’s World War II veterans and their families.

Laurel Meadow Elementary School, Hanover, $6,500 for Laurel Meadow’s Lion’s Den, a project that will allow students to write across the curriculum on topics such as the life processes of plants and to paint a mural in the school library.

The Steward School, independent, $5,000 for The Leonardo Project, which will allow students to create a digital database exploring photography’s relationship to the acquisition of scientific knowledge.

Mary Munford Elementary School, Richmond, $6,300 for Seasonal Gardens under the Sun, a project that integrates history, environmental science, language arts and visual arts to help students explore the natural world and humans’ relationship to it.

Robious Middle School, Chesterfield, for Keep Your Watershed Together: Be a Part of the Whole!

George Wythe High School, Richmond, for Historical Perspectiveand Storytelling Applied to Contemporary Art

Powhatan Elementary School, Powhatan, for Jack’s Garden

Franklin Military Academy, Richmond, for The Walk through History Mural

Application deadlines for 2013-14 PIA Awards are online and updated guidelines will be posted soon. Feel free to run ideas for projects by Rob and me at any point. You can email us at pia@richmond.edu or call us at 804-955-4016. PIA Awards are for you and your school. It’s your creative ideas and your know-how that make projects work. And don’t you want one of these fabulous trophies?

True, last week was Partners in the Arts’ seventeenth summer institute for teachers, but who’s counting? It was our first Joan Oates Institute forPartners in the Arts. More info about the week to come, but here’s a cool photo taken by Alexandra Hunter, UR Downtown’s Events and Projects Coordinator.

Liz

The talented trio who performed at JOI’s jazz and STEM workshop. From left to right, Russell Wilson, Michael Hawkins, and Abinnet Berhanu, along with vocalist (and literature professor!) Hermine Pinson seated on the right. The workshop took place in Frederick Rehearsal Hall at UR’s Modlin Center. Photo credit Alexandra Hunter

I have pasted a paragraph, and provided the link below from a post by a former humanities teacher turned technology integration specialist. There are many great resources in the link, but I wanted to point out the collaborative project she highlights and how it aligns with what we do at PIA.

On the teacher training side, we’ll be holding our 17th annual week long, 3-credit summer institute, now the Joan Oates Institute, June 27-July 1. This institute is designed to give all educators the skills to use the arts in their classrooms through experiential workshops, field trips and great food. Our Awards letter of intent deadline for the 2012-2013 school year will be in December.

The model is: Attend the Joan Oates Institute (JOI [joy]) with a team from your school, then take the knowledge you’ve gained and design a project like the one below. Successful proposals incorporate teacher training, visiting artists and collaboration among a variety of your school’s classroom, art/music, or technology teachers.